Ring of Fire

“Walk the Line” and “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.”

He was homely as a young man, gloomy-looking, even a little forlorn, with a thin mouth and ears that stuck out, and he didn’t know quite what to do with himself. As all the world is aware, however, no one ever aged better than Johnny Cash: if it’s a cliché to say that he looked like a broken plow, he had the scars and the deep furrows to make the cliché ring true. For all his talk of prison, he never did do hard time, but hard times he knew well enough. When people looked at Johnny Cash, they saw Experience and Authenticity and Power, and perhaps only the literal-minded wanted to know where life ended and show business began. Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Cash in the bio-pic “Walk the Line,” is a remarkable-looking actor, with deep-set blue eyes, a long chin, and a scarred upper lip that serves as a nice equivalent to Cash’s crags and creases. At the age of thirty-one, Phoenix has developed a malignant beauty reminiscent of Jack Palance’s glowering splendor in his Prince of Darkness phase. As I watched Phoenix sling his guitar around and gun it at the audience in Cash’s shambling style, I couldn’t imagine anyone better suited to play the role. But this movie is a lot less interesting than it might be. Though it’s not bad—in fact, it’s rather sweet—it’s too simple a portrait of a very complicated and calculating entertainer.

The film’s writer-director, James Mangold, working with the screenwriter Gill Dennis, is skillful but safe-playing. The early days of young J.R., as everyone calls him, are handled gently, but without much imaginative drive. In rounded earth tones, Mangold and the cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, set up the physical and moral hardships of Cash’s life in rural Arkansas during and after the Second World War: Cash as a boy picking cotton in the hot sun; his virtuous older brother dying in an accident as he’s trying to earn money for the family, and his enraged, dead-eyed father (Robert Patrick), somehow holding J.R. responsible. As a young man, J.R. is a diffident door-to-door salesman who plays the guitar warily, almost on the sly; he marries a loving but conventional woman (Vivian Liberto) who wants him home with her and the kids, and has little interest in his talent. When he impresses Sam Phillips, of Sun Records, in 1955, he escapes into what the movie represents as mild vagabondage on the road, in the company of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and a doe-eyed, swivelling boy named Elvis, who, someone says, “is only interested in poon.” The actors do all their own singing, and, in Phoenix’s case, the pitch isn’t always steady, but the slightly shabby amateurism of their Southern and Canadian tours feels right. Country, R. & B., and rock in its nascent phase were all sloshing around together in 1956, and the participants didn’t necessarily know that history had seized them by the shoulders.

Through all this, Cash boozes and scarfs down pills; he suffers from a sense of unworthiness, brought on, perhaps, by his brother’s death. Who knows? His temperament is only vaguely suggested. The actual Johnny Cash combined the sinner and the Christian in one body; people loved him, and identified with him, because he conveyed how hard it was to be a good man. But the movie offers a tame version of that struggle. At times, Phoenix looks as if he wanted to kill somebody, but Mangold hasn’t written anything interesting for him to say, and most of the time Cash comes off as furtive, weak, and lost. When he meets June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), of the Carter Family, he can no longer hide. Witherspoon, shaking long black tresses, makes Carter quick and funny, highly sexual and highly principled. She stares directly at Cash’s wavering character, and she nails him every time. “Walk the Line” becomes a kind of bantering romantic morality play, in which he struggles to be worthy of her love, and she struggles against her desire to have him. The outcome is never in doubt, of course—he gives in to responsibility and she to sex—and this pleasant movie ends with a celebration of their thirty-five-year-long union as it gets under way. But that union is less a ring of fire than a ring of virtue. Can the central lesson of Johnny Cash’s life really be that he was a loser until a good woman shamed him into growing up?

In the matter of the Wal-Mart company, of Bentonville, Arkansas, these facts may be stipulated: It employs roughly a million two hundred thousand men and women in the United States. The average wage for full-time, hourly Wal-Mart employees is nine dollars and seventy cents an hour; the average annual income for such workers is about seventeen thousand dollars. Half of Wal-Mart’s employees cannot afford the company’s health-care plan for their children, so many apply for public assistance from state and federal Medicaid programs. Wal-Mart saves individual consumers hundreds of dollars every year, but, when the company builds one of its gargantuan facilities at the edge of a small city or town, and then sells goods at reduced prices, the normal effect of shopping malls on retail businesses is doubled: long-standing stores get boarded up; wages and, often, property values decline; streets turn derelict and empty.

So reads the docket. The people’s court will now convene. Most of this information, and a great deal more, can be found in Robert Greenwald’s accusatory new documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.” I harp on what is well established because Wal-Mart has, according to the Times, established a “war room” staffed by, among others, former officials of both the Kerry and the Bush election teams, in order to refute the alleged canards of its many critics. But, before Wal-Mart begins shooting off its pop guns, let me say that Greenwald’s film could not possibly be confused with a work of documentary art. Greenwald—the director of the 2004 “Outfoxed,” an exposé of Fox News—has made the cinematic equivalent of a smudged pamphlet distributed on the street. The director throws factual material onto the screen in a hyped-up, bullying rush. The sequence of events is often confusing. Fake newspaper-style headlines with exclamation points, in the manner of a Warner Bros. gangster movie from 1934, suddenly appear and disappear. In the midst of excerpted TV news reports about Wal-Mart, a voice is heard on the soundtrack which sounds like a newscaster speaking but is actually a voice-over concocted by the filmmakers. The effect, in general, is to surround the viewer with tightly edited outrages that often slur the distinction between fact and assertion. Nor does Greenwald take any interesting risks as a filmmaker. He offers nothing equivalent to, say, Michael Moore’s habit of placing his bulk, in attitudes of mock courtesy, in the path of public or corporate officials. But he does interview ex-employees, and their sore and unhappy testimony is the heart and soul of the movie. Former store managers speak with evident shame of stiffing workers out of overtime pay, busting up attempts to unionize, pushing poor families onto public assistance. Some of these people may have been stymied at the company, but I wouldn’t discount their testimony for that reason. Current employees are interviewed, too, some of them in dark shadow, and they all speak of intimidation as a way of life.

Greenwald’s shrewdest move was to unfurl the flag. He plays “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” on the soundtrack while making the case that Wal-Mart undermines basic American values. In an extended sequence, a family in Missouri that has, through three generations, nurtured and expanded an IGA store is put out of business within months of Wal-Mart’s arrival on the outskirts of town. These are conservative people, patriots, and believers in free enterprise. Stunned and almost choking, they are aware that to complain about the workings of capitalism could sound like self-pity; they can do little but say, over and over, that Wal-Mart’s triumph—it even receives subsidies from their community—is “unfair.” Along with the employees, these are the company’s victims.

The last section of the movie, which reminds me of pulse-raising, bluntly obvious films that I saw at student rallies in the sixties, is devoted to the fervent anti-Wal-Mart movement—groups that have organized to file suit or to keep the company out. Greenwald presents these folks—employees, ministers, lawyers, lefties, and wealthy homeowners, too—as an unstoppable wave of resistance. “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” is an organizing tool, a film for use. Greenwald plans to show it to church groups and at community meetings and to sell it as an inexpensive video. Much of it goes by in a blur, but I won’t easily forget a young woman with two kids, living below the poverty line, who says in passing that she works at Wal-Mart, cashes her check, and then shops at Wal-Mart. She may have other choices, but she has stopped making them. For all its missteps, the movie powerfully suggests that Wal-Mart is capable of demoralizing a community so thoroughly that it doesn’t have the spirit to carry on its life outside the big box. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.